Performance Study on Indexing and Accessing of Small File in Hadoop Distributed File System

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is developed to efficiently store and handle the vast quantity of files in a distributed environment over a cluster of computers. Various commodity hardware forms the Hadoop cluster, which is inexpensive and easily available. The large number of small files stored in HDFS consumed more memory which lags the performance because small files consumed heavy load on NameNode. Thus, the efficiency of indexing and accessing the small files on HDFS is improved by several techniques, such as archive files, New Hadoop Archive (New HAR), CombineFileInputFormat (CFIF), and Sequence file generation. The archive file combines the small files into single blocks. The new HAR file combines the smaller files into a single large file. The CFIF module merges the multiple files into a single split using NameNode, and the sequence file combines all the small files into a single sequence. The indexing and accessing of a small file in HDFS are evaluated using performance metrics, such as processing time and memory usage. The experiment shows that the sequence file generation approach is efficient when compared to other approaches concerning file access time is 1.5s, memory usage is 20 KB in multi-node, and the processing time is 0.1s.